Cars around the world will one day be propelled by electric motors, UC Davis transportation expert Daniel Sperling told a meeting of international transportation experts and policymakers in London today.

Sperling said the transformation of cars and the car industry has begun with gasoline-electric hybrids, and will continue in the next decades with the wide adoption of plug-in electric hybrids, battery-only electric cars, and fuel cell electric vehicles.

The director of the UC Davis Institute of Transportation Studies, Sperling was the keynote speaker at a two-day conference hosted by the United Kingdom's Department for Business, Enterprise & Regulatory Reform, "Low Carbon Cars: Exploring the Challenge of Bringing Electric Vehicles to Market."

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown called for the conference after discussions about transportation energy reform this summer at the Jeddah International Energy Conference in Saudi Arabia, G8 Summit in Tokyo, and British International Motor show in London.

Sperling praised Brown's leadership in "setting the ball rolling on the low-carbon vehicle future for the UK and the rest of the world."

"New collaborations are required across governments and industries," Sperling said last week in Davis. "We need to facilitate connections between vehicles and the electrical grid, we need collaborations across the automotive and electrical industries, and we need co-ordination and co-operation across governments.

"Only through joint international action arising through events such as this conference will these changes come about."

Other speakers at the event included: Geoff Hoon, UK secretary of state for transport; Lewis Booth, Ford Motor Co. chief financial officer; Tayce Wakefield, General Motors vice president for public policy; Ian Marchant, Scottish and Southern Energy chief executive officer; and Terunobu Yamauchi, director for automotive policy planning of Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry.